One Cut of the Dead (2017) Review
9/10
Real zombies interrupt a film crew shooting a low-budget zombie picture in an abandoned water filtration plant. The camera doesn’t cut. Performances are strange, the pacing sags, an actor stares at the lens, and somebody is visibly waiting for a cue. The 9 is for a structure nobody had attempted and almost nobody could execute. Every flaw in the opening half hour is a deliberate plant, and the second half detonates all of them in sequence, and the film becomes funnier the more precisely it repeats itself.
It’s also, underneath the machinery, about a middling director who has spent a career taking work he doesn’t respect, and the last act gives him one afternoon where the compromise is worth it.
I adore this movie. Few films have made me laugh this hard at a payoff I’d been handed half an hour earlier and failed to recognize, and the only thing keeping it off a 10 for me is that the opening asks a lot of patience before it pays anything back.
The First Thirty-Seven Minutes
The opening is a single unbroken take and it’s not good. The dialogue is stilted, there are long dead pauses, an actress stares directly into the camera, and the operator is at one point clearly stationary for no reason.
A great many viewers stop here, and the film accepts that as the price. It’s asking an audience to sit through something deliberately poor on the promise that the poorness is the subject, and it offers no reassurance at any point in that first half hour.
That’s my one complaint, and it’s a small one. I’d have trimmed a few minutes from the opening take if the gag allowed it, and I know it doesn’t.
What makes it survivable is that it’s never boring, only odd. Something strange happens roughly every ninety seconds, and the accumulating wrongness becomes its own kind of tension.
The take itself is also a genuine unbroken shot, performed for real, and people forget that once the comedy starts. Whatever else the opening is, it’s thirty-seven minutes of live performance with no safety net.
The blood on the lens, the axe that doesn’t connect, the long shot of an empty roof, the hatchet held at a peculiar angle. Every one of those is a question the film has deliberately raised and will answer later.
A deliberately flawed opening is the highest-risk structure available and it requires the flaws to be interesting instead of merely bad. The rule is that every defect must be specific and memorable. A vague weakness can’t be paid off, because the reader won’t have retained it.
Set the running time of the gamble. Thirty-seven minutes is an enormous ask, and the film is honest with itself that it’ll lose people.
The promise has to be visible. Something is clearly wrong instead of clearly incompetent, and that distinction keeps an audience in the room.
The Middle Is the Setup
The second act jumps back a month. A working television director is hired to make a live, single-take zombie broadcast for a new channel, and the film becomes a workplace comedy. Everything in this stretch is planting. A lead actor who won’t do anything without motivation, an actress who can’t hit her marks, a producer’s daughter with opinions, a cameraman with a bad back, an alcoholic sound man, and a performer with chronic diarrhea. The director himself is the film’s center and he’s written with real affection. Higurashi is fast, cheap and acceptable, which is his professional motto, and he’s never once made anything he cared about. His wife is a former actress with a method problem, retired because she was too intense to work with, and their daughter wants to make films and thinks her father is a hack. All three of those are essential.
Harumi Shuhama is the funniest performer in it and the film holds her back deliberately. Nao is introduced as a mild woman doing self-defense classes, and what she becomes once she’s required on camera is the single biggest laugh in the picture. Nao is my favorite thing in the film. I laughed harder at her than at anything else in it, and the script is smart to sit on her for an hour before letting her loose.
The Third Act Detonates Everything
The last stretch replays the opening take from behind the camera, and every inexplicable moment is revealed to have a practical cause happening two feet outside the frame.
The staring actress is receiving instructions. The stationary camera is because the operator has collapsed. The long shot of a roof is a desperate improvisation because an actor has gone missing. The peculiar hatchet angle is a prop breaking. The comedy accelerates because the audience is now ahead of the film. They know what shot is coming next, they know it looked wrong, and the pleasure is watching the crew fight their way toward producing it.
It’s also the only comic structure I know of where the jokes improve on rewatching. A second viewing of the opening is a completely different experience, because every flaw in it is now visible as somebody’s desperate solution to a problem the audience has been shown in detail. The human pyramid is the moment that justifies the whole structure. A crane fails, the shot requires height, and the entire crew including the producer physically builds a platform out of themselves while the camera keeps rolling.
The axe that doesn’t connect is the smaller one I like better. In the opening it reads as a botched effect and a performer visibly missing, and the explanation is that the actor playing the victim has passed out and the swing was pulled deliberately to avoid killing him.
A payoff structure works when the audience is given the effect before the cause, because the second pass converts them from observers into participants. They’re no longer wondering what happens, they’re waiting to find out why. That’s a more active and more pleasurable position. Every plant should pay off as a joke and as a piece of character. The stationary camera is funny and it also establishes that a man with a bad back kept filming after he fell. Order your reveals by escalation. The small ones first, the pyramid last, so that each explanation raises what the next one has to achieve.
It Is About Making Things
Underneath the machinery is a plain story about a man who has always taken the work and never defended anything. The broadcast is a ridiculous job for a channel nobody will watch, with impossible constraints and a producer who won’t listen, and he does it anyway because that’s what he does.
What changes is that he has to improvise continuously for thirty-seven minutes, with his wife and daughter, and by the end he’s made something he’s proud of by any measure that matters to him.
The daughter’s arc is the same thing from the other direction. She’s been contemptuous of compromise, gets thrown into the production, and discovers that finishing something under impossible conditions is its own achievement.
The last shot is the pyramid photographed from outside, the crew holding each other up, and it’s a sincere image about collaborative work arriving at the end of a comedy about a bad zombie film. The behind-the-scenes footage over the credits extends it one step further, showing the actual production building the actual pyramid. That collapses the film and its subject into the same event. Whether that’s a flourish or the point is a matter of taste and it landed for me.
Twenty-Five Thousand Dollars
Shinichiro Ueda made it with students from a film workshop, an unknown cast, a single main location and a budget around three million yen.
It played one small Tokyo cinema, spread entirely by word of mouth, expanded across the country and eventually took over a thousand times its cost. The film’s own success tells the same story the film does, a cheap crew with nothing going for them making something people couldn’t stop talking about, and I find that enormously satisfying.
The constraints are also visible in the right way. One location, a small cast, and a conceit that turns the limitations into the subject. That’s the most efficient use of no money anybody has managed recently.
It’s been remade in France and the original remains the one to see, largely because the surprise can’t be reproduced and because the affection in it belongs to the people who really made it this way. There was also a plagiarism dispute with the stage play the film draws on, settled with a credit and a payment. That’s worth knowing and doesn’t change what’s on screen. The execution here’s entirely the film’s own.
Turn your constraint into your conceit. No money means one location, a small cast and no effects, and this film made all three of those the plot. Ask what your limitation would look like if it were deliberate. That question has produced more good work than any amount of funding.
A story about making something under pressure is the one every writer has access to, and it works because the reader can feel the effort in the object they’re holding. Word of mouth is what happens when a work rewards being explained to somebody. Build in something a viewer will want to describe.
Should you watch One Cut of the Dead?
Yes, and don’t read anything about it first. Sit through thirty-seven minutes of a bad zombie film in one take, and then watch an hour that explains every single thing wrong with it, ending on a crew building a platform out of their own bodies.
It gets a 9 from me because the structure is a stunt that turns into a story about people making something they’re proud of, and that’s the last thing I’d expect from a zombie comedy with a stationary camera. The slow first half hour is the only thing I’d hold against it, and even that pays off in the end.
